In a telling sign that employers’ stricter in-office mandates are paying dividends, New York office foot traffic in July topped the pre-pandemic level, a new study found.
The activity in New York, the largest U.S. office market, in July was up 1.3% from the same month in 2019, the first time such a threshold was crossed, according to data analysis firm Placer.ai, whose study is based on tracking anonymized foot traffic from some 1,000 U.S. commercial office buildings, including those with retail spaces on the first floor. The research doesn’t include government buildings or mixed-use buildings that are both residential and commercial.
The milestone New York reached marked the first time any major city Placer.ai tracks had closed the pre-pandemic return-to-office visit gap since Placer.ai began following return-to-office activity in 2020, a spokesperson told CoStar News.
New York is home to many financial services firms such as banking giant JPMorgan Chase and hedge fund Citadel that have implemented stricter in-office mandates, Placer.ai said. Both companies and other major U.S. employers including Goldman Sachs, Amazon and AT&T have publicly said or are reported to have called their employees to return to the office full time.
In Miami, which Placer.ai said has developed a “thriving” financial sector of its own, foot traffic in July was just 0.1% shy of the July 2019 level, the second-best performer after New York. Together the two markets beat other cities that still saw double-digit declines in the range of about 15% in Atlanta and 18% in Dallas to a drop of more than a third in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver.
Still, despite the sharp contrasts in foot traffic, the return-to-office trend nationwide is heading in the positive direction. Nationwide office visits in July were about 21.8% shy of the pre-pandemic level, the smallest gap since 2019, as employers including Samsung, Google and Starbucks have tightened their return-to-office policies in recent months, according to Placer.ai.
“July 2025 seems to mark a meaningful [return to office] tipping point, with numerous markets making substantial progress toward pre‐COVID office foot traffic levels,” Placer.ai said. While hybrid work remains prevalent across industries, a majority of Fortune 100 employees have been called to be at their workplaces full time, Placer.ai said.
Some 54% of Fortune 100 companies reported having a full-time in-office policy in the second quarter, up from just 5% during the same period in 2023, according to a JLL study. The employees were required to be in the office an average of 3.9 days a week in the second quarter, up from 2.6 days during the same time two years earlier, JLL said.
More U.S. employers are tracking how many days employees are in the office and are taking enforcement action, according to a separate CBRE study.
New York’s office leasing performance has outshined the U.S. average of late. Manhattan's new office leasing totals for the first six months of 2025 surpassed the same period in some years leading up to the pandemic, according to a CoStar analysis. From 2016 to 2019, about 15 million square feet of space was newly leased during the first six months of each year, while more than 16.1 million square feet was leased in the first half of 2025.
“Manhattan is universally claimed to be the strongest real estate market in the country, and the strongest by far,” Vornado Chief Executive Steven Roth said recently.